BRIEF HISTORY OF THE VERTUE CLASS

One of the most enduring of Jack Laurent Giles’s designs, the Vertue has been praised since the 1930s for her performance. She has a good turn of speed in light air’s but it’s when the going gets tough she shows her true pedigree. Adrian Morgan, owner of Vertue Sally II, talks about the design – and the legends: 

Myths, Stories & History of The Vertue class
Courtesy Adrian Morgan

Affixed to the wall next to the harbormaster's office in Durban, according to Vertue myth, is a notice. 'In winds over Force 7, no yacht may depart without my authority, unless she's a Vertue.' It is the kind of story owners of these modest little cruising yachts tend to take with a pinch of salt. Vertues have made pioneering voyages, survived savage storms, written themselves into sailing history. Indeed, more has been written about this Laurent Giles designed vessel than almost any other. There is no need for myth. The reality is enough.

Testimonials to her weatherliness are legion. Just one will do, from Claude Wyatt, owner of Dawn, built by Cheoy Lee in 1965. ‘In 30 years of owning various sailing craft this Vertue is the finest little vessel I’ve ever sailed,’ he wrote in 1971. ‘The more I sail her, the more I’m amazed at her ability. As you know, we have normal winds in this area of 20-40 knots. All she wants is the right amount of sail area and she just keeps going, seems to love it, and balances like a dream. In other words ‘a real thoroughbred’.” 

Speaking as an owner of Sally II, the second of the ‘class’, built in 1937, for the past ten years, I can’t fault that description. She does indeed get better as it gets windier. Under deep-reefed main and working jib, she’ll jog along in perfect equilibrium, the helm light, that deep, easy hull bounding along like a docile labrador, never slamming, and seldom shipping any water. Recently, on a trip back from Stornoway on Lewis, Sally averaged nearly six knots under just such a rig, in a Force 6-7, a delight from the moment the Hebrides faded to the sighting of Coigach and the approach to Ullapool. In the only Round the Island Race we entered, she placed 12th in class, and would have been in the top five had we not driven her onto Ryde Sands in the closing stages of the race.

Most extraordinary, perhaps, for a yacht whose wake has criss-crossed every ocean, is the fact she was originally designed to do no more than potter about the Solent, cruise the West Country perhaps and hop down to the Channel Islands. These humble beginnings have resulted in arguably the best loved small cruiser ever designed, complete with a ready-made worldwide family.

Substantially designed and constructed for serious and short handed ocean cruising. The pedigree of this sporting English thoroughbred started life in 1936 when Jack Giles designed Andrelot, a 25-ft gaff rigged cutter with graceful sheerline and wine glass transom. Since that time virtues have set standards that other yachts have tried to emulate. The Vertue II has all the benefits of the up to date GRP enclosed construction, virtually unchanged from her successful predecessor, but taking full advantage of modern technology. She was re-designed by Laurent Giles with an extra 8" in its beam at deck level, without changing the under-water lines, to provide more internal space. This together with the addition of an attractive coach roof and doghouse gives the Vertue II better accommodation with a 6' 3" standing headroom.

Point a Virtue's nose to the horizon, and she just says "where shall we go?". It was just such a spirit that spawned the first of the class, Andrillot, in 1936. Dick Kinnersly approached Jack Giles for a boat of his own. The commission would not have been worth much, for the effort expended on such a small vessel, but he drew her well. Giles said he based the lines on those of French fishing boats, with a touch of West Country pilots (Bristol Channel cutters), all leavened by the then current RORC's notions of a seagoing yacht.

Andrillot's lines echo those of Giles's little 23-footer, the Lymington Class. 'In general character she was like a Lymington One Design,' Giles's erstwhile partner Alan Roy once told me. 'Similar to a number of boats he produced, certainly pretty.' But not especially magic, he implied. Seeing them together you would never guess that one would achieve fame through her ocean exploits, the other remain a Solent day racing boat.

'Could you just draw out the LOD's lines a little,' Kinnersly had asked Giles 'as I want a boat in which two people can sleep, cook and go cruising.' He didn't mind a transom - it was cheaper not to draw the ends out - but the entry had to be good and he wanted 'plenty of air aloft,' which meant a topsail. Kinnersly had scant time to enjoy his overgrown Solent day sailer before war intervened. his maiden sail involved him single handing to Guernsey and back home up the Beaulieu River, engineless, in the days when you could without T-boning Lord Whathisname's Nic 45.

All modest enough stuff, until Humphrey Barton, keen to make a name for himself and his partner, Jack Laurent Giles, slipped Kinnersly £15 for the loan of Andrillot and set off down the Lymington River in the early hours of 12 June, returning after'a most enjoyable cruise...' 855 miles and 22 ports later, during which he proved that 'the little boat certainly did go.' He then sailed Monie, No3, from Berthons in Lymington, round Britain anticlockwise to her new owner in Wales. 'Left or right,' he was supposed to have asked -at the mouth of the river. The reputation began. Peter Stevenson who restored Andrillot, V1, has been known to appear briefly at classic boat rallies, but is more often than not somewhere off the Casquets dodging the shipping.

Lawrence Biddle was to add to that reputation two years later when he and Tony Hills sailed the fifth of the class, Epeneta, to Belle lle and back to win the Little Ship Club's Vertue Cup, after which the class took its name. It was to be the first of four such cups won by the class (the latest being Melusine for a round Scotland voyage in 1995).

Over 60 years later they still certainly do go. The Vertue has been through many changes above the water - higher topsides, longer coachroof, doghouses, rigs - but below the waterline they are the same. Andrillot's hull is identical to Vertue XXXV's hull in which Barton sailed to America in 1950, "the most perfect small ocean-going yacht that has ever been designed and built", said 'Hum' after arriving in New York, 47 days later. The same hull shape too as Cardinal Vertue which placed third in the first OSTAR behind Francis Chichester and Blondie Hasler, and became the smallest yacht to have rounded Cape Horn. Sold to Bill Nance, Cardinal Vertue was to circumnavigate the globe, one of four by the class, three of which were singlehanded. By then 100 Vertues had been built.

Transatlantics are two a penny. In 1956 David Robertson sailed singlehanded from Falmouth to the Bahamas, encountering hurricanes Connie and Dione with wind speeds estimated at 70mph. In 1953 Commander Hamilton had sailed his Speedwell of Hong Kong from Singapore to Portsmouth; in 1968 John Ryley sailed Sekyd, now owned by marine photographer Lester McCarthy from Woodbridge, via the French canals to the Red Sea.

But roll calls don't tell the real story - of modest little boats, touched by greatness, which epitomise all one could ever ask for in a cruising yacht. If the term 'little ship' could apply to any class, it would be the Vertue, a friendly, boat'y boat that brings smiles to the faces of those who own them, and to those who watch them drop anchor, and can't wait to row over to ask the perennial question 'is she a Vertue'?